


starlit eyes and treehouse dreams

by typical_art_dork



Series: summer of '86 [2]
Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: El wants a dog, F/F, F/M, Fluff and Humor, Good Babysitter Steve Harrington, Like Really Badly, M/M, POV Robin Buckley, Robin Buckley & Steve Harrington Friendship, Slice of Life, The kids want to build a treehouse, Treehouse-building?, and legally Steve and Robin cannot refuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-24
Updated: 2020-04-24
Packaged: 2021-03-02 04:01:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,668
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23828779
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/typical_art_dork/pseuds/typical_art_dork
Summary: It's June 1986, and the Party wants to build a treehouse, much to Steve and Robin's amusement. Because Steve is a slave to the "Mother Hen Instinct", as Robin aptly refers to it, he agrees to help the little shitheads build a home-y hideaway in the woods of Hawkins after minimal convincing from Dustin. After enlisting the help of Jonathan and Nancy, who probably know a hell of a lot more about what they're doing than Robin and Steve, they parade into the forest and get to work.Of course, "work" for Steve, Robin, and the Party usually entails a hell of a lot of horsing around and an incremental amount of actual effort expended. Luckily, they've got Nancy.A little slice-of-life exploration into Robin's sense of belonging with Steve, the Byers family, Nancy, and the Party :)
Relationships: Eleven | Jane Hopper/Maxine "Max" Mayfield, Jonathan Byers/Nancy Wheeler, Joyce Byers/Jim "Chief" Hopper, Robin Buckley & Nancy Wheeler, Robin Buckley & Steve Harrington, Robin Buckley & The Party, Steve Harrington & The Party, Steve Harrington/Johnathan Byers if you squint, Will Byers/Mike Wheeler
Series: summer of '86 [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1713808
Comments: 20
Kudos: 138





	starlit eyes and treehouse dreams

**Author's Note:**

> Good morning/afternoon/evening, and welcome to another installment of my "Summer of '86" slice-of-life series! This little chapter is set in June, a month before the treasure hunt fiasco that is Part 1 of this series. If you haven't already read that one, you won't need to know anything about it to read this, but if you want to give it a shot after reading this fic, you can pop on over by looking at the last fic in this series. 
> 
> If you're into sappy, comedic, and theme-based stories revolving around Steve and Robin's friendship and their bond with the Party, this is the story for you!
> 
> If you're a music-lover like me, try listening to my playlist entitled "starlit eyes and treehouse dreams" on Spotify :)  
> If nothing else, listen to "Apple Pie" by Lizzie McAlpine when you get to the end.  
> Happy reading!

JUNE

It starts, as most things do, in Mike Wheeler’s basement. 

It’s the first full week of summer in Hawkins, and Robin and Steve are spending it with six thirteen-year-olds. Sounds about right. 

Robin’s got her head in Steve’s lap, sprawling out on the worn red couch that faces the table the kids use for their roleplaying game. They’ve migrated to the Wheelers’ residence from Will’s house because Joyce is in a tizzy about spring cleaning, and her flurried movement around the house, towing trash bags and Lysol from room to room, was becoming a mild distraction. Will pointed out that “spring” cleaning was a little overdue-- after she started working at Hawkins PD with Hopper, Joyce left most of the housework to Will. Not that the kid wasn’t happy to help out-- Robin had seen him voluntarily dust the windowsills on various occasions “for fun”. But a thirteen-year-old with five hours of homework a night can only do so much, so the dishes and laundry and clutter have piled up over time, and now that the vast expanse of June, July, and August is spread out before them, Joyce is finally tackling the mess. 

So anyway, she’s splayed out on the couch with Steve sitting upright like a normal human being-- boring-- twisting strands of her hair into a messy braid. She’s been trying to teach him how to style girls’ hair so he can actually help her give El and Max makeovers instead of just sitting and watching or dancing around Robin’s room to whatever Madonna song Max has picked out, so he’s been using her hair to practice lately. It’s kind of soothing, except for when the idiot tugs too hard on a strand. 

“No, no, no,” Dustin is saying over the constant chatter of the other five kids, in the tone of voice he reserves for when Mike’s annoying the shit out of him. “We can’t use the wood from Max’s shed, her dad will kill us.”

From across the table, Max rolls her eyes. “He wouldn’t kill ALL of us,” she amends, like that’s of any reassurance. “Just whoever he catches taking it.”

Robin tilts her head up to see if Steve’s been listening, because this doesn’t really sound like a DnD conversation, but he just shrugs his shoulders at her like, ‘what’? 

Idiot.

“Well, I’ll do it,” Mike volunteers confidently, and Will’s face visibly pales. 

“No,” Max vetoes. “I can do it, it’s right in my backyard.”

A flurry of disagreement rises up from the rest of them at that, but Max just rolls her eyes. 

“It’s not a big deal, he won’t even notice.”

“Yeah,” Dustin says, “until he goes to get firewood and all of it’s freaking gone!”

“Why would he need firewood in summer, Dustin?” Mike deadpans. 

“Shut up, Mike.”

Alright, what the hell is this about? 

“Hey, small children,” Robin drawls, batting Steve’s hand away from her hair and sitting up. “What is this discussion about? Because it doesn’t sound like DnD campaigning to me.”

There’s a beat of silence in which all the kids send the same panicked glance at one another, and Robin realizes that they’re using their special little language again. It’s the same kind of language she has with Steve-- communication in exclusively facial expressions. No words needed. She first saw the kids do it one rainy Saturday in September. She was lounging on the Byers’ couch, because this was before Steve found the apartment she currently shared with him but after her parents kicked her out for her “deviance”, and Joyce asked the kids from her seat in the kitchen if they were the ones that had broken the vase on the top shelf of her pantry, because it wasn’t in shards the last time she saw it, and in the living room, Mike and Will seemed to have an entire conversation exclusively through raised eyebrows and widened eyes. 

The issue was resolved when El emerged from the hall and confessed to breaking it accidentally with her powers, which Robin knew hadn’t been the case because she’d winked at Will when she said it, but still. It was cute. 

After another drawn-out second of the idiots just staring at each other, Mike rolls his eyes, the little anklebiter, and says, “We’re building something. Well, planning to build something, anyway.”

Robin squints at him. Alright, kid. Playing the cryptic game. She gets it. 

Mike’s reply seems to finally catch Steve’s attention, because his brow furrows all serious-like and Robin feels herself instinctively smiling. The dingus has this built-in mother hen instinct, and the second he hears about the kids doing anything that could be considered remotely dangerous, he just has to swoop in. 

Steve pauses for a moment, just watching the kids with this ‘I know you’re up to no good’ glare, and Robin has to bite her lip to keep from laughing as they grow more and more fidgety under his gaze. 

“What exactly. . . are you building?” Steve asks, all slow, like he’s Karen Wheeler doing one of her ‘who exactly broke this window’ interrogations. God, Robin still gets chills thinking about that day. Lucas and Dustin got into one of their spazzy half-fights again, and it resulted in Lucas accidentally slamming Dustin into the window of Mike’s living room, which promptly cracked with this terrifying crunching sound that made Steve cringe. Karen had marched into the room seconds later, and Dustin and Lucas and the rest of the kids were consequently subjected to an hour of questioning. Robin still gets the shivers just thinking about that woman’s glare. 

Now, she only smiles as Steve crosses his arms authoritatively and says, “Well?”

The room is silent for a few hilarious beats until all the kids speak at once.

“Race track,” El says with dead seriousness at the same time Max and Mike mumble something about a birdhouse, and Lucas says, in a voice that’s surprisingly convincing, that they’re planning to build a log cabin.

They all look at each other in horror, like their telepathic signals got fucked up and each of them was expecting to be the only one that spoke. Mike mouths “race track?” to himself in pure incredulity as Lucas sighs his I-hate-this-family sigh before dropping his head into his hands. 

Robin can practically hear Steve’s voice in her head: ‘don’t laugh, don’t laugh, don’t laugh’. 

“Huh,” Steve huffs out, and Robin can fucking see the moron biting his cheek to keep from bursting into laughter. “So which one of those things is it? A race track, El? Really?”

Dustin mutters, “Jesus fuck”, and El seems to realize that her answer makes absolutely zero sense, because her face reddens to about the shade of Max’s hair. Robin loves this child with her whole heart. 

“Yes,” El says evenly after a moment. “A race track.”

Mike bangs the table with his fist in defeat as Max starts to snicker beside him, and Will giggles hesitantly after a moment. 

“You’re building a race track out of wood,” Steve deadpans, and El, bless her, nods. 

“El,” Dustin says, using the same voice he uses with Steve to describe some elementary concept that the dingus should already understand, “race tracks are for cars, not Max’s skateboard. And they’re not made of wood.”

“Oh,” El whispers.

“Like, no part of them is made out of wood,” Dustin barrels on, and Max is full-on guffawing now as Mike screams into the surface of the table like he’s in physical pain, “absolutely none. Race tracks are made out of, like, asphalt and concrete and limestone.”

Robin shoots another glance at Steve, but somehow he still hasn’t cracked, and she guesses that maybe his concern about what the little morons are actually planning to build outweighs the hilarity of El’s fake answer. 

“Okay,” Steve says, like he’s mulling the situation over. “So what are you guys really building?”

Mike sighs, picking his head up off the table like it’s a Herculean effort, and glares at Steve. 

“A treehouse,” he spits, and Robin knows it’s the truth because Dustin lets out a groan like, ‘dude, you snitched’, and Will pales even more. 

At first, Robin has to wonder why the little mongrels were so intent on keeping that from her and Steve. After all, they’ve embarked on more chaotic endeavors before (read: the search for Will, fighting an army of demodogs, doing whatever the hell it was they did when Steve, Robin, and Dustin infiltrated the Russians’ lab). But then again, they could seriously injure themselves if they attempted this feat alone, and Robin dreads thinking about how Joyce or Hopper would react if they realized the kids had turned their backyard into a construction site. Also, the kids can just be weird and secretive like this-- Robin knows all of them well enough by now to understand that their little group is sacred, and although she’s secured her place among them, she’s still bordering on being an outsider in the sense that she’s older, like Steve and Nancy and Jonathan. 

So, out of all the shit these kids have gotten themselves into (and out of, with help from Steve and Joyce and Hopper), building a treehouse doesn’t really sound mega-freaking-dangerous to Robin. 

Nevertheless, Mike’s answer seems to catch Steve off-guard, and he tilts his head incrementally, eyebrows furrowed again in that weirdly calculating way they do sometimes, and finally says, “Well, shit, that actually doesn’t sound as life-threatening as I thought. Want any help?”

Lucas’ face jerks up out of his hands, and Mike’s scowl shifts like he’s trying to hold back a smile. El doesn’t do anything to hide her excitement, though, and she nods vigorously as Max pipes up, “Sure!” at the same time that Dustin goes, “HELL yeah!”

Will just sits quietly next to Mike, smiling softly, a passive observer as always, and Robin feels a surge of protectiveness well up in her towards the kid. After living with the Byers family for a month or so after her parents kicked her out, she inherited this weird maternal streak from Joyce-- but of course, if anyone asks, it’s all Steve’s influence. 

Anyway-- the kids are psyched, practically bouncing in their seats with excitement, and if Steve backs out of this commitment (Robin knows the dingus won’t, but still), she’ll probably have to actually murder him. 

“Okay,” Steve says decisively, leaning forward to rest his hands on his knees, and the action is so fatherly that Robin feels that weird tug in her chest that only Steve is able to cause. She knows he loves the kids, but sometimes it surprises her how quick he is to shift from Vaguely Annoying Best Friend mode into Helicopter Parent With A Heart Of Gold mode. She can’t decide which version of him she likes more. 

“I can drive you little dipshits to the hardware store tomorrow and we can buy a fuckton of wood,” Steve starts, raising his voice over the excited chatter from the kids, “on ONE condition, alright?”

They manage to quiet down a bit when Max hushes the rest of them, reaching across the table to clap a hand over Dustin’s never-ending fountain of speech. He grins mischievously from behind her hand, and suddenly her face twists with disgust before she recoils, wiping her hand on Mike’s polo.

“Dustin Henderson, did you just LICK me?!” she shrieks, and Lucas claps his own hand over his mouth to keep from laughing. Dustin nods, and a shit-eating grin spreads across his face as Max settles back into her seat, seething silently. 

“What condition would that be, Mom?” Mike asks Steve snarkily, just ignoring Max and Dustin’s bullshit, and Robin catches the corner of Steve’s mouth twitch.

Ha. She’s in the lead now. Take THAT, Ozone-Killer. 

Robin and Steve have a secret, ongoing game of ‘Whoever Laughs First Loses’ when they’re around the kids-- it’s become a bit of a problem-- that grows increasingly difficult every time they’re babysitting, because the kids are always doing and saying impossibly stupid shit, and it’s hard not to burst out laughing when they get into the sort of trouble that only they seem capable of getting into. Robin has an infallible poker face from years of living under her disciplinarian parents’ roof, but Steve is pretty good at it, too, so the competition is fierce and the rules are unflinchingly rigid: a smile or half-smile loses you five points, and a laugh loses you ten. You earn points by staying straight-faced when the kids do something idiotic.

“That we build it in the woods away from any of your houses,” Steve says. “And that we don’t make El do all the work.”

“That’s two conditions, Dingus,” Robin points out, and he glares at her, like the kids wouldn't have caught on if she hadn’t said anything. 

“Alright, then there’s two conditions,” he says, reaching over to tug on her half-finished braid before standing up and brushing himself off-- Max got Dorito dust on him earlier when they’d all been throwing chips at each other (don’t ask). 

“Wait,” El pipes up, and all the kids turn to look at her expectantly. “Can we buy the wood today?”

“Yeah,” Dustin barrels forward before Steve gets the chance to shoot the idea down. “It’s not even noon, and it’s not like you and Robin have got anything else going on!”

“For once, I agree with Dusty-bun,” Lucas says, ducking out of the way of the game piece Dustin chucks at his head. 

“Hold up,” Steve interjects, lifting a hand like, ‘slow the hell down’. 

“How do you little dipshits know Rob and I don’t have, like--” he shoots a glance at her, “--a party to go to, or something?”

Mike honest-to-God cackles at that, and to be fair, Robin can’t really blame him. She’s not exactly a social butterfly, and Steve’s definitely not picking up any hot dates from behind the counter of Family Video, so. 

“Robin never leaves the apartment unless she’s with you, and you never leave the apartment unless you’re taking us somewhere or going to work or going to get coffee with Nance and Jonathan,” Max says pointedly, and Steve just sighs and throws his hands up, like, ‘can’t argue with that logic’. 

“Okay, valid,” Robin concedes, earning a smile from Max. 

“So?” Dustin says impatiently, already standing from his seat. He knows Steve will cave. 

Steve shoots Robin a curious glance, like, ‘should we?’, and she pulls herself up off the couch, moving to stand beside him. 

“Sounds like a plan to me,” Robin says resolutely, and she sees Steve break into a smile as the kids bolt up from their seats. 

“Hey, shitheads!” Steve yells after them as they race up Mike’s basement stairs. “We are NOT building an entire treehouse today, alright?!”

“Yes we are!” Mike shouts back, stumbling over Lucas on the steps. 

Steve heaves his I-can’t-believe-I-agreed-to-this sigh as the kids bound up the stairs and into the hall, scrubbing a hand over his face dramatically. Robin grins like they’re in on a joke and shoulders her way past him, clapping him on the shoulder as she bounces up the steps. 

“You brought this on yourself, Steven,” she says gravely, laughing as he shoves her into the house and lets the door to the basement slam shut behind them. 

The kids already have their shoes on, and they’re standing in a jumbled group at Mike’s front door, chattering excitedly over the sounds of Back to the Future floating in from the living room TV. Robin’s not gonna lie-- there’s something oddly comforting about Mike’s house. Maybe it’s that there’s always something going on; sound is ever-present, whether it’s in the form of the oven beeping, the TV blaring, or the kids screaming about their DnD campaign from the home-y hideaway that is the Wheelers’ basement. Robin’s childhood home was always unnervingly quiet. Her parents were either always working themselves to the bone or sleeping, and mealtimes were the only time of day she ever really heard them speak. She knew that they’d sacrificed a lot for her, that they’d loved her, but she always suspected they hadn’t really wanted a kid. It was probably a huge relief to them when she gave them an excuse to lose her. 

“Rob,” Steve says, breaking her out of her reverie as he ushers the kids out the door, “you good?”

“Yeah,” she replies, smiling as Steve tugs on one of Dustin’s curls as the kid bolts out the door, and she finds that she actually means it. 

Something in Robin’s voice seems to satisfy Steve, and he nods at her before jogging to his car and throwing the driver’s side door open as the kids pile into the back. 

Mike, Dustin, and Lucas have an ongoing dispute regarding the seating arrangement in Steve’s car-- none of them want to ride in the last row of seats, and Robin still doesn’t know why it’s so important to them, but it can get downright bloody sometimes. Steve’s joked on multiple occasions that he should just buy a big van to cart the kids around in, because they spend more time in his car than maybe even Robin does (she’s kind of a hermit if she’s not with him), and Robin’s determined to save up enough money by Steve’s twentieth birthday to actually buy him one. 

“Mike,” Dustin is whining as Will cops a seat in the second row and Max rushes in beside him, “I rode in the third row last time. This is a blatant pattern of disrespect towards me and I won’t stand for it any longer!”

Steve snorts out a laugh as Robin clambers into the passenger’s seat, and she points an accusatory finger in his face. 

“Ha! You’ve smiled once and laughed once now, Harrington! Minus fifteen points, moron!”

Steve scoffs, waving a dismissive hand at her as Mike shoves Dustin into the third row and reluctantly slides in beside him, tugging Lucas along. They always give El a seat in the second row. Freakin’ weirdos. 

“I did not SMILE, Buckley,” Steve says, checking his mirrors before pulling out of the Wheelers’ driveway as the kids bicker over what they’re going to primarily use the treehouse for. 

“You did too,” she shoots back, grinning at him. “I saw it. After Mike called you ‘mom’? Yeah, you smiled, Dingus. Plain as day.”

Steve sighs like he’s fed up with her insistence, but there’s a grin playing at his lips now, too. 

“Fine,” he concedes, and Robin throws two fists up in the air celebratorily as he rolls his eyes. 

“Are all the little dipshits back there?” he asks her, throwing a quick glance up at the rearview mirror. 

“Yeah,” Robin says, “you did a head-count before we pulled out of the driveway.”

“Right,” Steve nods, blowing out a breath she didn’t know he’d been holding. “Sorry. Just makin’ sure.”

Robin smiles to herself. Mother hen instinct, ladies and gentlemen. 

As Steve pulls out of the Wheelers’ neighborhood, Robin shoves a tape in his tape player-- one of the ones she made with Max and El one rainy afternoon last October. They stayed up all night picking the perfect songs as Adventures In Babysitting blared in the background from Robin’s TV; nearly everything on the tape is something by Madonna or Cyndi Lauper, and honestly, Robin isn’t complaining. 

Neither is Steve-- she pretends not to notice his hands tapping out the beat to “Material Girl” on the steering wheel to save him the last shred of his dignity, though, because Robin’s a saint like that. 

“God, Mike, just shut up and listen to Max for like, five minutes,” Lucas is saying as Steve brakes at a red light. “She knows what she’s talking about!”

Max throws up her hands, like, ‘finally’-- “THANK you, Lucas,” she says. “Listen, if we use it as a safehouse it’ll just sit in the woods until we need it. We can still make it fun, like-- we can make it a hangout spot when we aren’t using it for a hideout.”

“But that’s destroying its original purpose,” Mike argues, leaning over the second row of seats to glare at Max. “If we get it all cluttered with games and pillows and shit, it won’t be of any use to us when we actually do need it, which we WILL.”

Will sighs as they continue bickering, and finally jumps in when Dustin yells at the others to shut up.

“Listen,” he says. “We don’t know when we’re going to need it, so there’s no harm in using it for fun while we can. Like. . . like Castle Byers, right? I hid there when I needed it, but for the most part I just used it for fun.”

This seems to quiet Mike, and Robin smiles to herself when he murmurs an apology to Max. 

She’ll be honest-- she didn’t even think about the kids wanting to build this shit from a serious standpoint. She’d been positive that it was merely for fun, a project just big enough to stave off the monotony of summer that’s somehow already settled in. Knowing that they’re still thinking in terms of when the next disaster could befall them makes Robin’s heart ache. After all they’ve been through, the kids deserve a goddamn break. 

“Hey, morons,” Steve cuts in, turning down the music. “You guys know Rob and I’s apartment is the ideal meeting spot for when weird shit goes down, so let’s keep it that way, yeah? Let’s just. . . let’s build this thing for fun.”

Robin nods, twisting in her seat to face the kids. “Steve’s right, guys. The apartment’s safer than a treehouse is gonna be-- it’s on the edge of town away from all the bullshit that usually happens here, it has A.C., and we’ve got a stockpile of chocolate pudding for Dustin and El.”

Dustin grins toothily at her as the kids murmur in agreement, and Robin counts it as a win when El shoots her a tiny smile in the rearview mirror. 

Madonna croons out “Lucky Star” as the landscape of Hawkins blurs by outside Robin’s window. She’s memorized every street corner, every stretch of woods, and every store clustered in the center of town, but somehow everything still looks new from the passenger’s seat of Steve’s car. He’s got the windows rolled down, and the scent of jasmine and that woodsy smell that’s ever-present in Hawkins floats in as the summer breeze stirs up the wildlife outside. Robin props her feet up on the dashboard, and Steve sighs with that exasperated fondness he’s adopted for the times that Robin tries to get a rise out of him. 

As they roll past Dinah’s Diner and pull into the parking lot of Hawkins’ Hardware, the kids chattering in the backseat, Robin lets her head loll back against her headrest and sighs happily. 

There was a time-- that hazy stretch of months before she met Steve and the kids-- when Robin believed she’d never feel like she had a real family, and shit, she hates to get all sappy even in her own head, but as Steve bops his head to the music and Dustin rattles off useless information about what race tracks are actually made of and Mike and Lucas hatch a plan to get second-row seats on the way home, she feels this bone-deep sense of belonging tug at her heart, like, ‘this is where I’m supposed to be’. 

Steve jerks the car into park, and the kids shove their way out of the car as Robin unbuckles her seatbelt and grabs Steve’s wallet from the console. 

“El,” Dustin is saying, jostling past Mike and Will as they head for the store, “even if we could get a TV up in the treehouse, there’d be no way to watch it. It has to be connected to, like, cables and shit, and if we’re in the middle of the woods, there’s no way that’s possible.”

“Let the girl dream,” Max chides, looping her arm in El’s. “She just wants to watch her soap operas and eat Joyce’s homemade soup all summer, and you can’t fault her for that when all you ever do is read your little science books all day.”

Mike laughs as Dustin’s face reddens. “Well, at least I’m actually showing academic promise,” he sputters, and Robin bites down hard on the inside of her cheek to keep from laughing, because ‘academic promise’. . . God, she loves this kid. 

“TV is educational,” El says with so much conviction that Steve nearly loses it right there in front of the hardware store-- Robin can see it in the bastard’s eyes. Laugh, goddammit it. 

Will nods gravely. “I’ve. . . seen some things. Let’s just say I didn’t exactly need to sit through Ms. Roberts’ sex ed unit in health class last year.”

El just looks confused, but Mike and Lucas snicker as Steve claps his hands authoritatively. 

“Alright, dipshits,” he says, like ‘that’s enough of that’, and Robin can see that he’s holding back laughter, “Enough loitering around out here. C’mon, I didn’t drive you all down here to stand outside a hardware store.” 

Robin gets the door as he finishes his sentence, and the kids shuffle inside as she holds it open for them. 

Steve, she notices, doesn’t have any circles under his eyes for once. She hands him his wallet and smiles.

Today is gonna be a good day. 

\---

Hawkins’ Hardware Store is a humble establishment: despite its deceptive name, it’s just about as small as the rest of the little shops clustered together in the center of town. It’s the kind of store that would be spacious if the manager put in a little more effort-- the shelves lining the walls are home to various power tools, lawn and garden products, cans of paint in various shades of brown and beige, and just about every type of lock, chain, and hinge Robin’s familiar with. 

There’s no one at the single-register counter, and Robin thanks the Universe for the privacy-- the kids are being their usual obnoxious selves, and the last thing she and Steve need is another judgemental adult searing glares into the backs of their heads. 

“Are we sure this place is open?” Will asks cautiously, gesturing to the empty counter. Dustin, Lucas, and Max saunter right past him, unbothered, as he pauses in front of the cash register. 

“Yeah, don’t worry about it,” Steve assures him. “The manager’s probably in a back room or something.”

This seems to put Will’s worries to rest, and he follows Mike into the aisles of paint swatches as Max drags El over to look at the various gardening tools an aisle over. Robin thinks she’s overheard the girls talking about starting a garden outside Hopper’s shed once or twice before, and she guesses that’s what they’re whispering excitedly about while Will stuffs paint swatches into his pockets, no doubt so he can replicate the shades with his acrylic paints at home. Cute. 

The plywood is in the very back of the store, grouped with the nails, screws, and hammers, and Steve makes a beeline for it as the rest of the kids branch off into other aisles on the hunt for paint and various possible decor. 

Robin’s torn between following the kids to keep an eye on them or following Steve, but he makes the decision for her, tugging her by one of her overall straps to the back of the store. The kids are out of Robin’s field of vision now, but thankfully they’re still in earshot.

Exhibit A: Dustin cursing loudly as a clatter erupts from the far right side of the store. It’s followed by a splattering sound, and Robin hears the frenzied whisper-screaming of Lucas and Mike as Steve peruses the different types of plywood. 

“Clean it up! Just-- shit, find a mop or something,” Max is saying frantically, and this catches Steve’s attention. His brow creases, and he pushes past Robin-- fuckin’ rude-- before hurrying over to the source of the commotion. Robin curses quietly under her breath and follows suit, weaving between the aisles as the whispering grows louder and more manic. 

“I’m so sorry, Steve,” Dustin is blabbering when Robin finally arrives at the crime scene.

Dustin’s standing in the middle of the paint aisle, and splattered on the floor is a frankly revolting shade of green-- think vomit or interdimensional monster sludge-- that covers at least two feet of the pristine white floor of the aisle. The paint can is lying tragically on its side a few feet from Dustin, and Robin notices a long vertical crack in the side of the container as Max scrambles back into sight holding a mop. 

Honestly, Robin doesn’t even want to know where she found it. 

“Holy shit, holy shit,” Lucas is whisper-screaming, his eyes bugging out as Steve’s face grows progressively redder by the second. He hasn’t said a word in the five seconds he’s been standing in front of the massacre, and that scares the hell out of Robin. 

Finally, Mike breaks the deadly silence that’s settled in the air around them. 

“Steve?”

“This is what we’re going to do,” Steve says in this super quiet voice she thinks she’s only heard once before in the two years she’s known him. Yeah, he’s PISSED pissed. “We’re going to clean this up faster than Mike does his chores, and then you little dipshits are going to help me and Robin pick out what type of plywood to use for the treehouse.”

The kids all nod, and Steve huffs angrily as they mop up the spill. Robin heaves a sigh when all the mopping does is smear the paint around on the floor, and Steve shoulders past her to remove himself from the equation altogether. 

El emerges from a nearby aisle, her quick gaze assessing the situation as Dustin tries fruitlessly to get the paint off of the floor. She walks with purpose down the aisle and stands over the mess, watching Dustin with masked amusement as he drops the mop to the floor with a frustrated sigh. 

“I can fix it,” she says in that quiet, monotonous voice that usually preludes the use of her telekinesis, and Robin thanks the stars above for the girl’s supernatural abilities. 

She watches in silent awe as El lifts her hands and the paint-- well, Robin can only really describe it as a sort of melting-- seems to float upwards into mid-air, still maintaining uniformity as Max rushes to grab the trash can from the front of the store. The redhead bounds back into the aisle a moment later, and El guides the paint with an outstretched hand into the bin as Lucas and Dustin retrieve the paint can and mop from the floor. 

Mike grins as El and Max high-five, and Robin allows herself a tiny moment of second-hand victory before she shuffles out of the aisle in search of Steve. 

She finds him in the back of the store again, running his hands through his hair like he only does when he’s super stressed. Great. 

Robin approaches him cautiously, but when he turns to look at her, his features have relaxed a bit from the scowl he’d worn minutes earlier. 

“Hey,” Robin greets carefully. “El cleaned it up, everything’s fine. . . are you okay?”

Steve only sighs, shaking his head incrementally, and Robin places a comforting hand on his shoulder. 

“Steve, what is this about? You were fine a while ago. The paint’s gone, I mean, the floor’s spotless--”

“I wasn’t pissed about the fuckin’ mess, Rob,” Steve sighs. “Okay, I was a little, but that wasn’t what set me off.”

“Then what did?”

Steve sighs again, a short burst of pent-up irritation that’s aimed more at himself than Robin. “It’s just. . . they want to paint it green, Robin. To blend in with the damn trees.”

She’s not getting something. 

“Okayyy,” she draws out, pausing for a moment. “And what’s so bad about that?”

“They want it to be camouflaged so that. . . so that whatever shithead monster attacks them next can’t fucking see it.”

Oh. 

Steve wasn’t mad at Dustin, he was mad at the kids’ situation. 

“Steve. . . it’s okay,” she tries. “Really. They’re just paranoid, y’know, after everything, and it isn’t something any of us can control, so we can’t waste time stressing about it. They’re tough kids.”

He nods. “Yeah, I know. Of course they are. I’m just. . . I just get so angry sometimes. That they have to worry about the shit they worry about.”

“I know,” Robin says gently. “And you’re allowed to get mad. But I think you really scared Dustin earlier.”

His face falls, and Robin feels a pang of guilt in her chest. “Shit, you’re right,” he mutters. “I better go apologize to him. Thanks for talking me through that, Robs,” he says, ruffling her hair as he rushes past her to find Dustin. 

Robin sighs out the last of her Steve-related stress as she watches him go, then turns back to survey the plywood and boards in front of her. She might as well be of some use to all of them and just pick out a brand so they can get the hell out of dodge before the manager notices the green flecks that still speckle part of the floor (yeah, ‘spotless’ may have been a slight exaggeration on Robin’s part). 

She knows, deep down, that that little five-minute chat with Steve about his worries isn't adequate for the long-term, but she trusts him to be able to hold it together at least for the afternoon. Building the treehouse will be fun, and it’ll take his mind off of the kids’ problems, too-- it’s not like Dustin’s fears aren’t valid. Given the fact that the Great Interdimensional Monster Battles happen annually, Robin doubts they’re really safe this summer. It’s only a matter of time. . . 

“Robin!” Max calls, bounding up to her. She’s got a smile blooming on her face and packs of seeds clutched in both hands, and El rushes over to stand beside her, holding a watering can. 

Robin smiles back at them, pushing her worries to the back of her mind. 

“What’s up, little hellraisers? Wanna help me pick out the right type of plywood?” 

“Yeah,” Max says, El nodding as they move to peruse the shelves. 

Behind her, Robin can make out Dustin and Steve’s laughter, and she heaves an internal sigh of relief. Thank God the morons are all good. She knows their bond is unshakeable, as all of the kids’ bonds with Steve are, but the little paint spill debacle had worried her a bit. She’s never seen Dustin look at Steve that way before, and it reminds her vaguely of the way she remembers looking at her father. It doesn’t sit right with her, but she reminds herself that Steve wasn’t really mad at Dustin, and Dustin can be a dramatic little shit sometimes, so she guesses in the end it’s all fine. 

“I think I read something about needing lumber for framing and boards for the floor,” Max says, and Robin shuffles forward to look. 

“And we need plywood for the walls,” El adds. 

As the girls lift boards and lumber off of the shelves, Robin darts out of the aisle to wrangle in Dustin, Mike, Lucas, Will, and Steve to help. 

“Hey, Dingus!” she yells, and Steve comes bounding out of the paint aisle, grinning at her. 

“Jeez Robs, I’m in the middle of a paint swatch fight here,” he says, laughing as a sudden burst of paint swatches erupts like confetti from the aisle behind him. They rain down on him, fluttering into his hair. Robin rolls her eyes good-naturedly. 

“El and Max need help getting boards and plywood and shit,” she says. “Go drag the guys out of that warzone--” she gestures toward the aisle of paint swatches, “--and get your ass to the back of the store.”

Steve salutes her, then pivots on his heel and races towards the sound of Mike cursing Dustin out. Robin doesn’t even want to know. 

When the boys all rush to the plywood section, they’re carting a wheelbarrow along with them-- it looks large enough to carry all the wood they need, and Max and El deposit the lumber they’re already chosen into the bin. 

“How much is the wheelbarrow?” Robin asks Steve, and he laughs. 

“No idea. We’re not buying this thing, byt the way,” he tells Dustin sternly. “It’s purely for transportation purposes.”

“But we’ll need something to get the wood to the forest--”

“Yeah, so we’ll use the trunk of my car, smart one.”

Lucas and Mike snicker as Dustin sighs. Steve shakes his head at all of them before turning towards El and Max, who are still dropping wooden boards in the wheelbarrow. 

“Hey, hey, hey,” he says, and they halt in their tracks. “Do we really need ALL of this shit?”

“Language,” Mike says under his breath. El giggles quietly. 

“Uh, I think so,” Will supplies, eyeing the monstrous pile of wood stacked in the wheelbarrow. “I mean, it’s a treehouse, Steve.”

Steve sighs resignedly, and Robin can almost see him deflate. 

“I’m paying for this, aren’t I?” he asks her, and she huffs out a laugh, turning her empty pockets inside-out at him. 

“Jesus Christ.”

\---

One hour and a pleading phone call to Jonathan and Nancy later, Robin and Steve are helping the kids and the aforementioned power couple unload a million pounds of lumber from the trunk of Steve’s car onto the forest floor. They’ve parked in a small clearing deep in the woods, where the sun slants gorgeously through the tree branches that encircle the area, and a towering oak tree grows conveniently in the center of the glade. It looks strong and sturdy, like it could weather a good storm or two, and the kids had agreed delightedly that it was perfect. 

It was Steve’s idea to enlist Nancy and Jonathan’s help, because, as he’d so eloquently put it, “They’re smart as hell, and they probably know way more shit about building anything than we do.”

Of course, they did-- but in all fairness, that’s partially because Dustin had been talking Jonathan’s ear off about it every time he went over to Will’s, and Jonathan had figured it was only a matter of time before the kids needed help from him, so he’d checked out various books on the subject, because he’s a massive nerd with a heart too big for his body. 

Nancy had agreed on the grounds that she got to pick the next film at The Party’s Movie Night, a tradition that was known to cause various arguments among the Byers-Hopper clan, Steve and Robin, and Nancy. It was a tradition that was born shortly after Robin moved in temporarily with the Byers-- Will would invite his friends over, Jonathan would invite Nancy, and Robin would invite Steve, and the kids would huddle up on Joyce’s couch to fight over what movie to watch and discuss their next DnD campaign. Nancy and Jonathan and Steve and Robin would join them as Joyce and Hopper shared a glass of wine. It was a good de-stressing ritual at the end of every week, but it caused a lot of movie-related arguments. 

Nancy had been pleading with the group to watch The Breakfast Club for weeks now, and today she had the perfect opportunity to get her way seeing as it was Robin’s week to choose the film. 

So of course, Robin agreed. After all, as much as Dustin knew about science, she did NOT trust him to supervise the construction of the treehouse.

Fortunately for Robin and Steve, Nancy and Jonathan had read up on how to actually build the treehouse before they’d driven out to the woods, so they’d brought the necessary tools from Ted Wheeler’s garage and a measuring tape from Nancy’s desk drawer in their truck bed. Robin didn’t even consider that they'd need to measure and cut the wood before Nancy pulled a saw out of the back of the truck. 

“You know,” Jonathan says as he sets the last of the wood down on the ground, “this really shouldn’t be that hard, especially with all the books Dustin checked out about building this thing.”

“And we have Eleven,” Nancy adds. “You can help us reach the higher branches, right kiddo?” she asks El, who nods as Dustin heaves several library books out of the backseat.

“Okay, so we need to frame it first with the lumber,” Dustin instructs. Steve’s brow furrows.

“What the hell does that mean?”

“It means we need to, like, outline how tall and wide we want it to be,” Lucas says. 

“And where we want it to stand on the tree branches,” Nancy supplies.

As if on cue, Max emerges from the backseat of Steve’s car with a legal pad, a ruler, and several pencils. 

“We should draw everything out first,” she says in that matter-of-fact way of hers that instantly gets the rest of the kids to stop screwing around. 

Mike and Will drop the wooden boards they’re wielding at each other and follow Dustin, Lucas, and El as they crowd around the notepad with Max, leaning against the tailgate of the truck to draw out a rough sketch of the treehouse. 

“So,” Steve drawls, leaning against the side of his car to face Jonathan and Nancy, “what have you nerds been up to this summer?”

“It’s been five days,” Jonathan deadpans, and Robin stifles a giggle.

Nancy rolls her eyes at him, smiling at Steve. “Don’t mind him. He’s a little grumpy because he’d rather be in bed right about now.”

“It’s noon,” Steve shoots back, a smile tugging at his lips. “Geez, Jonathan, not really a morning person, are you?”

“The sun has no right to be this bright right now, okay?”

“You have no right to critique my sleep schedule when you say shit like that,” Nancy laughs. 

“Okay, FIRST of all, you stay up until three in the morning like you’ll fail all your classes if you don’t, Nance, which is just-- like, entirely untrue, so shut the fuck--”

“LANGUAGE!” Max yells from a few feet away. Steve scoffs at her. 

“Look who’s talking, Red!”

There’s a flurry of movement from the huddle of kids, and Max shoves her way past the group to march over to Steve. Her face is drawn up in a murderous scowl. 

If looks could kill, Steve would be a dead man. 

“Call me that again,” Max seethes, “And I’ll make you wish you were trapped in that Russian lab again, STEVEN.”

Jonathan sends a wide-eyed, panicked glance at Robin, like, ‘what the fuck?!’, but Steve only laughs, pushing her gently back towards the rest of the kids, who have abandoned their treehouse blueprints in favor of chasing each other around the clearing they’ve chosen to build the treehouse near. 

“Hey!” Steve yells above their rising laughter. “Stop horsing around and get your asses over here!”

Jonathan snorts out a laugh, and Nancy mouths ‘horsing around?’ at Robin questioningly. 

“Steve’s mother hen instinct sometimes causes him to talk like a housewife from the sixties,” Robin answers her aloud. “It’s just another symptom of his debilitating condition.”

“And what condition is that?” Jonathan asks, stifling a laugh as Steve takes off after the kids in an attempt to wrangle them back over to their blueprints. 

“Voluntary Babysitter Syndrome,” Robin replies gravely, wiping a fake tear from the corner of her eye and sniffing. “It’s terminal.”

“Get the HELL over here, Henderson!” Steve yells, grabbing the kid by his collar as Lucas screams his little-girl scream. 

“Tragic,” Nancy says grimly. 

Robin, Jonathan, and Nancy settle into a comfortable back-and-forth as Steve herds all the kids into a jumbled group a few feet away, and seconds later, he bounds over to them, sweeping wind-ruffled hair out of his eyes. 

“Okay,” he says breathlessly, shooting Jonathan a glare when he laughs, “I finally caught all of the little shits. They finished their rough sketch of the treehouse, so I guess we actually have to help them build this shit now.”

“Are we getting paid for this?” Nancy asks jokingly. “I think I remember Rob mentioning money over the phone earlier.”

Steve, not catching on, looks at Robin like she’s grown another head. “You told them we’re PAYING them?! I just blew all my savings from Family Video on the plywood!”

Jonathan snorts out a laugh as Robin shakes her head disbelievingly at Steve. 

“And here I was thinking you couldn’t get more dense.”

“Hey!”

“Nancy’s joking, dingus.”  
Steve glares at Nancy, but his panicked demeanor vanishes, shoulders relaxing when she laughs at the look on his face. 

“Guys,” Mike huffs from a few feet away. “Can we get started on building this now?”

Nancy rolls her eyes, but she moves past Steve to examine their blueprint all the same.

“As soon as you little dipshits stop acting like this is a goddamn playground,” Steve grumbles, following Nancy as Jonathan and Robin hide their laughter behind their hands. 

And so commences the construction of the treehouse. 

At the time, Robin had no idea it would destroy her will to live so quickly. 

\---

Having lived in the hellhole that is Hawkins for most of her life, Robin likes to think she’s accustomed to the weather. In fact, she prides herself on being able to brave the chill of winter with a rosy-cheeked smile. December and January are of the white-Christmas variety, frigid and snowy; the town is blanketed in a cottony sheen of snow every year, and Robin has fond memories of sledding down hills and reading classic literature from the comfort of the Byers’ house as flurries swirled outside. Winter is her kind of season-- cozy. Home-y. 

Summer in Hawkins, though. . . well, Robin might never adapt to it. 

Within the first twenty minutes of construction, she’s already sweating in her rainbow crop top and overalls. The kids are slowly losing their enthusiasm for the outdoors, too, and Lucas in particular looks especially disgruntled. Robin bets he’s regretting wearing jeans with his T-shirt today. Kind of serves him right for being so stubborn about it. 

So anyway, the sun is fucking baking all of them like Joyce’s famous apple turnovers as Steve measures out plywood and El carefully levitates the framework of the treehouse into a sturdy oak the kids had unanimously agreed on upon inspection. Robin’s job is to police Dustin and Lucas as Nancy makes sure Steve’s measuring out the right amount of wood for the floorboards, and she’s already feeling restless in the scalding heat. The forest is beautiful, sure, but she’d much rather be back in the Wheelers’ basement right about now-- at least that had A.C. 

“A little to the left,” Max instructs from her standpoint a few feet from the tree. She’s holding up both hands framing a rectangle in front of her face, boxing in the tree as El lowers the framing onto the branches from her seat on the edge of the tailgate of Jonathan’s truck. It looks like painstaking work to Robin, but the kid seems unbothered by it, sweeping wayward strands of hair back from her face as Max calls out directions to her.  
“I’ve never been more grateful for El’s powers,” Steve is saying as he marks where a piece of plywood needs to be cut. Jonathan snorts out a laugh at that, leaning over Steve as he works. 

“You might want to rethink that sentence, Steve.”

There’s a pause in which Steve’s face scrunches up, like, ‘I’m an idiot’, and Nancy laughs brightly as he shakes his head at himself. 

“Well, knowing Dingus, here, he’d probably kill himself trying to get that lumber all the way up there,” Robin says, intercepting the paintbrush Dustin’s hurled at Lucas. 

The boys, save for Will, who’s sitting beside El on the tailgate, have spiraled into chaos without Steve’s narrow-eyed helicopter parenting, and Robin honestly can’t really bring herself to care. After all they’ve endured, the kids deserve to just be kids sometimes. Of course, today being kids apparently entails chasing each other with a paint-slathered brush about the size of Robin’s face, and when she catches it, it sends a burst of blue paint splattering onto her overalls. 

“What the FUCK,” she screeches, and Steve’s head jerks up from the plywood in a panic. He laughs when he sees her paint-covered clothes, and Robin narrows her eyes at him, her gaze darting to the paint can sitting a few feet away. 

Jonathan seems to understand her idea first, and he stumbles out of the way with Nancy close behind just as Robin smothers the paintbrush in paint and throws it at Steve, who’s been too busy laughing at her to really comprehend her attack. 

“What the shit-- Robin!” He yells, flailing as the paintbrush hits him square in the chest, staining his white T-shirt a bright robin’s-egg blue. The kids all look over in unison, which would kind of creep Robin out if she wasn’t so busy dodging Steve’s retaliation-- he hurls the paintbrush back at her, and when she ducks, it hits Jonathan in the shoulder.

“Jonathan!” Mike screams from where he’s standing a few yards away, his hands waving above his head. “I’m open!”

Jonathan laughs and chucks the paintbrush at Mike, who actually catches it-- maybe he should try out for the high school baseball team his sophomore year, Robin muses-- and promptly sends it flying at Lucas’ face. 

“Hey, idiots,” Max calls from the little circle she’s made with Will and El. “If you use up all the paint, one of you has to buy us more!”

Steve’s face pales a little at that, like he’d forgotten they weren’t supposed to be spending the afternoon engaged in a spontaneous paint war, and Nancy sighs resignedly like, ‘oh, fine’ and says, “What the hell, I’ll pay for more paint.”

It’s as if a switch flips, and Lucas bounces into action, lunging for the nearest paint can and slinging paint with the brush straight at Steve. 

The dingus flat-out cackles as the brush misses him completely, landing in a patch of grass a foot or so to his left. 

“You have shit aim, Sinclair!”

“And you have a shit sense of style!” Lucas fires back, earning a chuckle from Jonathan. “Who wears a white T-shirt to work on a paint-related project?”

“I’ll have you know this is my BEST polyester blend, dipshit!” Steve shoots back indignantly, and Jonathan straight-up cackles as Lucas rolls his eyes. 

“Hey, idiots!” El interrupts from her seat on the tailgate, imitating Max’s imposing tone from earlier. “The framing and floors are done. I want to take a break.”

Robin looks up at the oak tree, and sure enough-- the treehouse is framed, and the floor is laid out, too. Damn- either El works faster than Robin realized, or they’ve just spent the last thirty minutes “horsing around”. Probably a little bit of both. The kids have chosen a classic light-wash wood that’ll be easy to paint; after some convincing from Steve, they reluctantly agreed to go for a “fun” paint color and not a practical one. In the end, they entrusted Will with the final decision because he had “an artist’s eye”, according to Mike-- whatever the hell that meant. He’d chosen a bright, robin’s-egg blue, and that was that. A bright blue treehouse-- true to the kids’ brand of Bizarre As Fuck. Look out, interdimensional monsters, these children are ODD. 

“Well, shit,” Steve says, smiling up at the half-skeleton of a house. “Nice work, kiddo! We’ll take it from here!”  
We will?

El beams at him, and goes back to talking animatedly with Max and Will about the garden they’re planning. They’re huddled around the tailgate of Jonathan’s truck, sitting safely out of the line of fire of the rocks Lucas has gathered from the surrounding brush of the forest. The sun is receding behind a cluster of clouds now, and the last rays of light filter warmly through the trees above, dappling the kids in a golden halo. Mike is lounging on the grass a few feet from the base of the oak tree, watching with mild disinterest as Nancy looks over the treehouse blueprints and calls out directions to Steve, who already looks stressed. 

“How the hell do we even cut this shit?” he asks, gesturing vaguely towards the heap of wood on the ground. 

“With a saw,” Jonathan deadpans, pointing at the blade lying a few feet away. Steve sighs like, ‘I don’t get paid enough for this shit’. 

“So what do we use for the walls again?” he asks Nancy, who sighs like she’s reaching her limit. 

“The wooden boards work best for the walls. We’ll have to cut them down to size and nail them together,” she says, pointing towards a hammer and nails resting beside the pile of wood. “It shouldn’t be too hard, just time-consuming.”

“You know what that means, man,” Jonathan says, clapping Steve on the back as he moves to stare at the heap of wood on the ground with him. “It’s time to get the hell to work.”

Steve finally shifts into Working Mom mode after Nancy threatens to saw his head off, hefting the boards the kids have chosen for the walls of their treehouse into his arms and heading for the oak tree. Jonathan’s propping a metal ladder Robin hadn’t noticed before up against the tree, and it stretches just high enough for Steve to reach the branches he needs to lean the walls against. 

As Nancy and Jonathan work out the logistics of securing the walls in place, Robin ambles over to Will, El, and Max, dropping into a crouch beside their little circle on the ground. They’ve brought snacks, she notices, and Max is keeping the plastic carton of strawberries safely out of the boys’ line of sight with her denim jacket shielding it from view. There are several chip bags of different varieties scattered on the grass, and Robin grabs an unopened bag of SunChips as she smiles at the kids. 

“Hi, Robin,” El greets her, and Robin waves at them, leaning over to snatch a strawberry from beside Max. 

“How goes it, strange children? You guys planning out your garden?”

“Yep,” Will says happily, popping the ‘p’. “We’ve got the dimensions all figured out already, and now we’re trying to decide on what all we want to grow. It’s gonna be right outside Hopper’s cabin.”

“Wow,” Robin says, letting admiration seep into her voice. “I didn’t know I was in the presence of a couple of farmers. Better not let Steve figure out your master plan, or he’ll probably raid your tomato plants overnight.”

El giggles, and Max pops a strawberry into her mouth, chewing pensively. 

“We’re not growing tomatoes,” Will informs Robin, pulling a face of mild disgust. 

“Uh, yes we are,” Max argues, nodding vigorously. “They’re the easiest to grow, and Joyce can use them for her spaghetti.”

“Mom’s spaghetti is kinda gross,” Will says, leaning forward to steal one of Robin’s chips, and El’s face goes slack-jawed in shock. Robin stifles a laugh.

“Joyce’s spaghetti is my reason for living,” El says seriously, and Max snickers. 

“Hard same,” Dustin agrees as he plops down beside them. He’s got bright blue paint drying crustily on the hem of his T-shirt and along his arms, and Robin snorts out a laugh at the sight of him. Max yanks the plastic carton of strawberries away from him when he reaches for one with blue-tinged fingers. 

“Uh-uh,” she scolds sharply, narrowing her eyes at him in silent judgement as Will and El laugh matching laughs. They’re growing closer with every passing day, and Robin swears they could be twins if it weren’t for the fact that they weren’t biological siblings (yet, anyway). They’ve both got the same quiet, calm demeanor about them despite the coldness that sometimes settles behind their eyes. They both speak in the same polite, gentle voice that demands silence from the rest of their rowdier friends, and they both seem to move in the same manner, too, almost like they’re floating among the other kids sometimes. Steve sees it, too, and sometimes makes little comments to Joyce about it, like, “they’re so alike already, why not just marry Hop so they can be actual twins?”

Speaking of the Joyce and Hopper situation-- Robin would be lying if she said she wasn’t as manic as Steve about them finally tying the knot. Ever since the Byers had moved back to Hawkins and Hopper had returned from his brief interdimensional Hawkins hiatus, the two have grown exponentially closer. The kids might not know all the details, but Robin and Steve are pretty positive that every time Joyce calls them over to babysit, she’s actually meeting Hop for dinner. Once, Jonathan phoned the both of them up at midnight, announcing in an excited whisper that he’d just seen Hop kiss Joyce good-night on the Byers’ porch. They’ve all been secretly (or not-so-secretly, in Steve’s case) rooting for a proposal for the last couple of months, but it’s been radio silence from both Hopper and Joyce when it comes to the topic of engagement. 

“Young man, get the HELL down from there RIGHT now!” Steve yells, snapping Robin out of the haze of her reverie. She would laugh at his word choice (“young man”-- just, no words) if he didn’t sound so freaked out.

She sends a frenzied glance in the direction of the commotion, and Mike is scrambling to hold on to a high branch of the oak tree, laughing maniacally as Steve clambers up the ladder and Nancy and Jonathan stand stock-still beside the tree, rooted (no pun intended, God) to the spot in fear. 

“Mike Wheeler!” Nancy screeches as the kid climbs higher. “Get back down here before you break your neck!”

“Uh-oh,” El says as Will and Max clamber to their feet, brushing grass off of their shorts and hurrying over to crowd around Nancy and Jonathan. Robin, Dustin and El follow suit as Steve yells at Mike from the top of the ladder, the telltale sound of panic creeping steadily into his voice. 

Mike, to his credit, is doing a pretty good job of evading Steve, who’s too cowardly to actually climb into the tree and wrangle the kid down. Mike’s got both arms wrapped around the branch, his legs dangling from the tree like he’s some sort of uncoordinated monkey. The sight would be almost funny if it didn’t send Robin’s heart climbing into her throat. El must be frantic now, too, because she abandons her gentle demeanor when she shoves past Robin and Dustin to get closer to the tree. Robin sees the telltale set of her jaw and relaxes incrementally when she realizes what the kid is going to do.

“Shit,” Mike says after a moment that feels like years, seeming to finally grasp the fact that he isn’t able to pull his scrawny ass back up onto the tree branch. “I can’t hold on!”

“No SHIT, dumbass!” Steve yells frantically, and Robin stifles a laugh as El lifts her hands and Mike is tugged gently off of the branch and into mid-air. Nancy seems to relax as he’s lowered swiftly to the ground, but Robin can still see her fists curled in anger at her sides. 

“What the hell, Mike?!” She yells, marching over to him as Steve clambers down from the ladder. The kids crowd around Mike before Nancy can rip him a new one, and the sight of them tugging him into a group hug softens the crease in her brow a bit. A breeze ruffles Jonathan’s hair as he places a comforting hand on her shoulder, and Robin smiles to herself. Thank God for thirteen-year-old girls with superpowers. 

“Okay,” Steve said commandingly once he’s pulled himself out of the jumble of kids. “If you’re under the age of seventeen and don’t have telekinetic abilities, get the hell away from this death trap until after Nance, Jonathan, Rob, and I are done building it. Got that?”

The kids mumble a unanimous “yes, Mom” that sends Jonathan into hysterics and amble away in the general direction of Jonathan’s truck to tear into the little picnic Nancy packed for them, far away from the apparent danger of the half-finished treehouse. 

In the stretch of time before Mike’s near brush with an untimely end, Steve, Jonathan, and Nancy had managed to get two of the four walls standing and, miraculously, securely attached to the rest of the treehouse. Robin feels a tiny swell of pride in her chest despite having been on babysitting duty while the rest of the teens got the brunt of the work done. 

As the little mongrels spread out two beach towels on the grass and divvy up the sandwiches, chip bags, and carrot sticks (“Nancy, why?!”) from the tupperware in Jonathan’s truck, Jonathan and Nancy start ordering Steve around again, instructing him to haul more wooden boards from the pile by his car over to the base of the tree. Robin’s willing to bet he’s regretting turning down Dustin’s pleas to buy that wheelbarrow in the hardware store earlier, and she laughs at Steve’s grumbled half-complaints as she helps him drag wood over to their humble little construction site. 

Robin, being the artistic one of the older group, is in charge of matching the finished product of the treehouse as closely as she can to the blueprint the kids have drawn up. Now that the sun has disappeared completely behind the blanket of clouds floating overhead, it’s harder to make out the scrawling rough sketch Max has scribbled onto the legal pad, but based on the way the treehouse is starting to look, she guesses she’s not doing half bad. The kids grow less and less hyper as the day drags on, and when Robin glances over at them after about an hour of work, they’re sprawled out on the towels, staring up at the clouds, chattering quietly. 

“No, that one looks like a dog,” El says over Mike’s words, pointing up at a cloud in the sky, and yeah, now that Robin squints and tilts her head just so, it does kind of look like a chihuahua. 

“God, give the dog thing a rest, El,” Lucas says. “Hopper’s never gonna let you have one.”

El pouts, and Robin smiles to herself. The kid’s been begging Hopper and Joyce for a dog since she saw “Annie” with Max, Steve, and Robin back in May-- Robin knows Joyce would cave in a second flat if it weren’t for Hopper’s gruff refusal. The guy has a weird aversion to animals altogether, and though he blames it on a fur allergy, Robin thinks it’s secretly because he doesn’t want anything else taking up El’s attention when she’s at home. His time away from El had made him even more of a helicopter parent than the dingus was, but in all fairness, Robin would feel the same way about her hypothetical kid if she was in Hopper’s position. Despite his antipathy towards the prospect of family pets, El is determined to break him down over time. Just last week, Robin caught the tail end of a conversation she was having with Will about it, and she’d mentioned something about “using the power of irritation”, which Joyce had stifled a laugh at over El’s shoulder.

“He will,” she replies self-assuredly. “Max has a plan.”

From her spot beside El, Max nods. “We’re gonna lead a stray to Will’s house with dog food Steve is gonna buy us. Joyce won’t be able to say no to it.”

“I’m buying you what?” Steve asks loudly from his spot up in the tree. He’s been working with Jonathan at securing the third wall for a while now, and Nancy’s been watching with quiet amusement at their mounting frustration as Robin eavesdrops on the kids.

“Nothing,” Max says quickly, and Will, Dustin, Lucas, and Mike snicker as El smiles quietly. 

“Correction,” Max amends, softer this time, “Steve will buy us dog food once we pitch the idea to him.”

“Yeah,” says El. “Once we pitch it to ‘im.” She mimes throwing a baseball into the air, and Nancy grins fondly at her. Looks like Robin’s not the only one listening in. 

The kids keep chattering about the clouds as the afternoon stumbles on, and once the third wall is up, Steve and Jonathan climb carefully down the ladder (Mike’s little incident earlier has made them all cautious) and ask Nancy and Robin if they want to take a break. 

“Hell yes,” Nancy sighs, a smile spreading across her face as Jonathan tugs her over to his truck. They all hop up into the truck-bed, Steve pulling Robin in last, before hollering down at the kids to toss them some leftover food. 

Bags of chips go sailing over the tailgate from the ground, courtesy of El, and Robin, Steve, Jonathan, and Nancy dig in as the kids drift off to sleep, quiet voices growing silent as they finally run out of the endless supply of energy they seem to have sometimes. They’ve been tiring easily as of late, probably due to the wave of stress they’d all experienced during finals week of their freshman year. After some pleading from El and a word of gentle advice from Joyce, Hopper had agreed to stop home-schooling her and send her to the local high school with the rest of the Party. Of course, it’d taken her a while to adjust to the curriculum, although the kid was a fast learner. Robin had served as her personal tutor when she’d taken up temporary residence with the Byers, teaching her to read the classics with ease-- Catcher in the Rye, Anne of Green Gables, Little Women, and The Scarlet Letter. Of course, Steve had slipped in a few choice novels of his own into El’s reading list, and (to Hopper’s disgust) one of her favorites ended up being Stephen King’s Carrie, for obvious reasons. As much as the kid loved literature, though, math was NOT her cup of tea-- her algebra final was a constant source of stress during the last couple of weeks of the school year, but she’d still passed, just barely. The kids had thrown her a party for it, too-- a sleepover that spanned for the expanse of two whole days at Steve and Robin’s apartment after school finally let out.

“So,” Steve drawls, letting his head loll back against the side of the truck-bed, “we did a pretty bang-up job.”

Robin shoots a calculating glance towards the nearly-finished treehouse-- it is decent-sized and sturdy-looking, and although it has no roof yet and is missing the front wall, she has to agree with him. With some charcoal-colored shingles, maybe a third coat of robin’s-egg blue paint and a few decorations from the bin of home decor the kids dragged along in the backseat of Steve’s car, it’ll look pretty damn cool. The oak tree is gorgeous, too, afternoon sunlight slipping dreamily through the leaves and branches that Jonathan hasn’t had to saw away to make room for the walls. 

“Well, it’s not done yet,” Nancy reminds them, “but yeah, it looks pretty great.” 

Steve smiles, soft and relaxed in the summer breeze, and Robin feels a tug in her chest. 

Two years ago, she was muddling through life, just going through the motions under her parents’ oppressive roof-- making decent grades, but staying in every weekend and crying herself to sleep on days when the world grew too heavy for her to shoulder. The two people that were supposed to love her unconditionally throughout her life were cold and distant, and she felt ostracized and utterly alone even though she was swallowed up in a sea of other people at Hawkins high. Now, she’s got a family that fits her, and she lives in a cozy apartment with her best friend, and she goes over to the Byers’ house every other Saturday to make fun of the kids’ movie choices and throw popcorn at Steve and Jonathan and whisper excitedly to Nancy as Joyce and Hopper hold hands under the kitchen table. Now, she spends her summers chasing kids that feel like her siblings around a sunny clearing in the forest and slinging cornflower-blue paint at people she didn’t even know throughout high school. Now, she leans her head on her best friend’s shoulder and breathes in the scent of jasmine floating through the air and feels the last rays of the sun caress her face as Jonathan tosses pretzels at Steve, who laughs and tries to catch them in his mouth. 

They stay like that in the truck-bed for about half an hour, just goofing off as the kids sleep off their sugar highs (Max had snuck candy from Mike’s pantry with her in her denim jacket pockets). At one point, Robin thinks she’s about to fall asleep herself, but Steve jostles her awake when he dodges a Frito Nancy flicks at his hair. Robin gets this weird feeling in her chest-- almost like a familiarity, a gentle pull at her heart that settles and sticks, like, ‘I belong here’. She’s felt like that a lot today. 

Finally, they all decide to at least finish securing the last wall of the treehouse in place, and Robin, Nancy, and Jonathan have to practically carry Steve out of the back of the truck, trying not to laugh their asses off and wake the kids up. 

As Jonathan and Steve nail the last board into place and carve out an opening for the door, Nancy and Robin lounge on another towel Nancy pulls from the passenger’s seat of Jonathan’s truck (Robin swears she must have an unlimited supply in there) and settle into an easy back-and-forth conversation that drifts aimlessly from the topic of Steve’s lack of balance to what college Robin wants to attend after her senior year to what Nancy and Jonathan’s plans are for the rest of the summer. 

Nancy mentions going to a Cure concert with Jonathan sometime in mid-July, and Steve almost falls off the ladder when Robin’s excited scream startles him. She apologizes profusely as Jonathan steadies him from his spot inside the treehouse, and Nancy laughs good-naturedly when Steve blushes. 

“You listen to The Cure?” Robin asks once Steve is done glaring at her. Nancy nods vigorously. 

“Jonathan introduced me to them this year, and they’re pretty much my life now.”

Robin laughs, nodding her agreement. “Same here. . . I’ve been hooked since sophomore year. ‘Just Like Heaven’ is literally better than sex.”

Nancy snorts out a laugh at that, and Robin tries not to show how proud she is at the fact that she made the other girl laugh. 

In all honesty, she’s been harboring a tiny half-crush on Nancy since they started hanging around each other after the Starcourt Disaster-- despite her adamant assurances to Steve that she thought Nancy was a priss, the girl was actually shockingly funny. After Robin had seen her give a sharp-tongued lecture to Steve about him “treating Robin right” (this was before he’d said, bewildered, that he and Robin were just friends), she’d taken a liking to Nancy. Of course, she still isn’t out to her or Jonathan-- only the kids and Steve and Joyce-- but they’re friends all the same. 

Robin thinks she might say something to them about why her parents actually kicked her out sometime in August; they’ll be heading back to college then, and they’ll have time away from her to let it all sink in. Of course, Robin knows Jonathan will be fine with it-- he’d been fine with Will’s “I think I might be gay” confession earlier in the year. Robin just isn’t as comfortable around him yet. Funny how only a couple of days of being Steve’s friend had yanked the words out of her, but it took months with anyone else to draw the truth out. As for Nancy, she’s not so sure. She’ll have to feel the situation out a little more before saying anything to her. 

“We’re done!” Steve yells excitedly, pulling Robin from her thoughts as he clambers down the ladder, caution forgotten. Jonathan follows him, albeit more carefully, as Nancy rises to her feet, assessing their work with silent approval. 

The kids all grumble from their spot on the ground a few feet away, and Max and Will sit up to survey the construction now that all the walls of the treehouse are complete. 

“Hey, it looks GOOD,” Will says, in a tone of voice that implies just how awful he’d been expecting it to look. El and Dustin shoot up into sitting positions at the approval in Will’s voice, and both of them smile at Steve and Jonathan’s work. 

“Pretty!” El gushes, clamoring to her feet and pulling Max up by her outstretched hand. 

Mike and Lucas rise to their feet along with the others, sporting matching grins as El bounds over to Steve and pulls him into a hug. He beams at her, and Jonathan ruffles El’s hair as he claps a hand on Steve’s shoulder. 

“Thank you, Steve!” Dustin cheers, rushing over to join El and pull him into a hug, Max following suit. Robin bolts forward, too, and the summer air suddenly feels lighter and cooler as the kids tug her into the group hug. 

Nancy and Jonathan watch with matching smiles that morph into laughs as Lucas races over and slings the remaining paint straight from the can into Steve’s hair. It splatters over the kids and Robin, too, and they all shriek in shock and-- in Steve’s case-- rage. 

“What the FUCK?!” Mike screams, lunging at Lucas as the kid just loses it, doubling over in a fit of giggles. Jonathan and Nancy just laugh harder at Mike’s colorful word choice, clutching each other for support as Steve shoulders his way past the kids and chucks the empty paint can at Lucas. 

He dodges it, and it hits Mike instead. What follows is what will go down in Party history as The Most Exhilarating Paint War Ever Fought. 

In a fit of rage and adrenaline, Mike lunges for the pyramid of paint cans Nancy’d carted over from the hardware store earlier in the day, pulling the lid off of a completely full one and slinging it at Steve, who yelps as the rest of the kids scatter, kicking up leaves left over from the last vestiges of autumn. They separate into jumbled teams, El and Max linking arms and dragging Will with them towards more paint in Steve’s car as Lucas, Dustin, and Mike race for the paint cans already on the grass. Steve darts toward the same area, grabbing a can and a brush. 

Nancy and Jonathan throw thrilled glances at Robin before they both lunge forward and grab the last paint can, and she hurries over to them as the kids open fire, slinging paint from cans and yelling with glee as El levitates her and Max’s ammo towards Steve and the others. 

“Oh my God!” Steve yells, dodging splatters of paint as they sail through the air like bullets. “El, the betrayal!”

El just smiles evilly, hopping out of the way as Dustin slings a paintbrush at her. It hits Max, tangling in her hair, and her face reddens in anger. Jonathan pulls Robin back, laughing as Max advances on Dustin with a murderous look in her eye. He’s all out of paint, and she’s got him cornered. 

Instead of throwing paint at him, though, she tackles him to the ground, and the rest of the kids lose it, doubling over in laughter as Dustin flails on the ground. Steve’s mother hen instinct is activated, and he drops the can of paint he’s holding (prompting a “you idiot, that’s three dollars I’ll never get back!” from Nancy) before rushing over to the fight.

“Max!” Steve yells, only half-irritated, and she looks up at him before hurriedly helping Dustin to his feet, as if just realizing what she’s doing. Nancy and Jonathan are losing it, and Robin realizes with surprise that this is the most she thinks she’s ever seen them laugh at a single event. To be fair, the spectacle is pretty hilarious-- a worried Steve, with blue paint coating half of his T-shirt, chewing out Max and Dustin as they try to stifle their own laughter into paint-covered hands while El continues to hurl paint at Mike and Lucas like nothing else matters. 

“Steve!” Mike yells, dashing over to use him as a shield against El. “She’s a madwoman! She’s finally snapped!”

“I’ll snap YOU,” El retorts, sending Jonathan, Nancy, and Robin into hysterics-- because, really, what does that even mean?

“Hey-- Mike, get away from me!” Steve yelps, lunging away from him to dodge the last of the paint from the can El’s got hefted in her arms. 

“JESUS, El,” Mike says, doubling over in laughter. “It’s just a game.”

“I know,” El assures him, nodding. “I win.”

Steve finally cracks at that, stumbling over to Robin and clutching her shoulder for support, and-- ew, he’s getting paint all over her!

“Steve,” Robin says, batting him away. “Get the hell off me!”

Nancy giggles when he pulls Robin into a tight embrace, smearing paint down the back of her overalls. 

“I’m gonna murder you in your sleep tonight,” Robin says as Will emerges from Jonathan’s truckbed. He’s been hiding there for the entirety of the paint fight, Robin realizes, and she envies him-- what a little genius.

“Hey, guys,” he says, laughing as the kids all glare at him. 

“Alright, how is that fair?” Max asks the rest of the group, wiping paint off her forehead. “If I get covered in paint, Will deserves to get covered in paint, too!”

“But we like Will,” El says, earning a laugh from Mike.

Will latches on to this, nodding vigorously as he backs away from an advancing Max. “Yeah! You guys like me, right?”

“Of course,” Max says, sickeningly sweet, “so you deserve to experience this with us!”

Before Steve can step in, she lunges for the last paint can and, in one swift motion, pours it over Will’s head. Jonathan cackles out a laugh as his little brother, in shock, probably, stands stock-still.

“What the FUCK!” Mike screams, and seriously, Robin’s about to go full Steve on this kid if he uses that word again. 

Will stands slack-jawed as Max drops the can of paint, her face rapidly morphing from triumphant to shocked. 

“Oh my God, Will, I’m so sorry,” she rushes out as Mike frantically wipes paint out of Will’s eyes before it can dry on the poor kid. “Jesus, that was really stupid of me.”  
“Yeah,” Will agrees in that gently polite way of his once Mike steps away, “It really was.” 

And then he’s lunging forward, shoving paint-covered hands into Max’s hair. She shrieks and twists away from him, but both of them are laughing with the rest of the kids.

“Holy shit,” Nancy finally breathes as the hilarity dies down. “I spent thirty dollars on that paint.”

Jonathan’s face pales, and Steve sighs out a “fuck”, but Nancy’s face crumples into another laugh. Robin laughs with her as Steve relaxes, and they fall into each other in hysterics, watching as the kids all wipe paint on each other in the middle of the clearing, screeching their little heads off into the summer air as the sun slips behind the trees above them. Robin feels this incredible lightness blossom in her chest, spiraling outwards in bright waves. Nancy's clutching both her arms as she laughs this belly-deep laugh that Robin didn't know she was capable of, and Jonathan is practically leaning on Steve as he cackles. 

“Steve,” Jonathan gasps, “you look like a fucking Smurf!”

Nancy erupts into giggles at that, and Steve looks stricken for a hilarious moment before he swipes the paintbrush he’s still holding across Jonathan’s forehead, smiling smugly. 

“So do you, dumbass.” 

\---

An hour later, Robin, Steve, Jonathan, Nancy, and the kids trail into the Byers house. It took them at least forty-five minutes to clean up all the scattered paint cans, brushes, and rollers from the forest floor, and another fifteen to make the Cyndi-Lauper-colored drive back to Will and Jonathan’s house. They’ve got paint caked in their hair, crusted over their clothes, and smeared up their arms, and Robin guesses it’s only fair that Joyce does not one but two double takes when they stumble through her front door.

She stands stock-still in front of all of them for a moment, her face unreadable as the kids snicker. Little shits. 

“Wow,” Joyce finally says, a smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. “Looks like you all got into a fight with Van Gogh.”

Nancy giggles as Joyce ushers them inside. “Yeah,” she says. “Definitely not each other.”

“Have the kids clean up first,” Joyce tells them in that voice Robin now recognizes as the one she uses when she’s trying not to laugh. “There are washcloths under the sink, and extra bottles of soap in the medicine cabinet.”

“You got it, Joyce,” Steve says, saluting her as they make a beeline for the hall bathroom.

“Alright, twerps,” he addresses the kids, and huh, that’s a new one, “wipe all that paint off and do it fast. If I have to spend another second with this shit in my hair, I’m gonna have a conniption.”

“‘Conniption’?” El asks as the rest of the kids shove their way into the bathroom, pulling open drawers and cabinets. 

“It means he’ll throw a tantrum,” Nancy explains, and El smiles knowingly at this piece of information. 

“Steve does act like a kid,” she nods gravely, and Steve huffs out a sigh that’s half-exasperation and half-fondness. Robin smiles at him, all soft, because at the risk of getting sappy, she loves the moron. 

“Nancy,” Max calls from inside the bathroom, “Can you help me get this out of my hair?”

Nancy smiles, and Robin guesses she’s probably regretting the whole Paint Catastrophe of 1987 even more now, but she shoulders her way into the bathroom anyway. 

As the kids pass Robin, Steve, and Jonathan washcloths and bars of soap from the bathroom, Robin finds herself smiling again. The house is loud-- she can hear Joyce moving around in the kitchen, no doubt making them all dinner because the sun’s slipped behind the trees now, and the kids are chattering as they scrub paint from under their fingernails and off of their clothes, and Jonathan, Steve, and Nancy have already started discussing how they’ll mount the treehouse’s roof shingles tomorrow. Kitchen cupboards slam, the bathroom sink runs-- partially drowned out by El, Max, and Will discussing their garden (“no tomatoes!”)-- and the front door of the Byers’ home opens and shuts, signalling Hopper’s arrival from work. 

“What the hell are they all doing?” Robin hears him ask Joyce from the kitchen. 

“Nancy, that hurts,” Max whines as the teen tugs at her hair. 

“I swear to God, if you plant tomatoes in my garden, I’ll fling myself into a vat of OIL,” Will is yelling at Mike, who just looks at him weird and goes, “What the hell does that mean?” as he wipes paint off of the other boy’s face.

It’s so loud, and Robin loves it. The thought hits her as Steve finishes scrubbing most of the paint off of his face-- he pulls her into a hug, a real one this time, and she just knows in her heart that this is her home. Not the Byers’ house, because she has the apartment she shares with Steve, but these people. 

They’re her home. 

Steve and his lavender-scented shampoo-- what a weirdo-- and Jonathan and Nancy, who are somehow still holding a conversation despite the fact that Nancy’s swallowed up in the jumble of kids in the bathroom, and Max and her fiery red hair that’s been tinged green by the paint, and El and Will with their gentle voices, and Dustin, who’s blabbering about what they’re going to put in the treehouse tomorrow, and Lucas and Mike as they fight over what movie to watch even though Robin’s got The Breakfast Club DVD for Nancy in the passenger seat of Steve’s car, and Joyce and Hopper as they laugh about the kids being covered in paint from the kitchen, which now smells oddly like apple pie and ice cream. 

God. It’s such a good “fuck you” to her parents, Robin thinks. What a goddamn UPGRADE.

When she pulls away from Steve’s embrace, Jonathan’s assessing them in that quietly calculating way of his, eyebrows furrowed in a way that reminds Robin of Steve when he talks to the kids about their latest mischievous scheme. 

“What was that about?” Robin asks Steve, laughing a little over all the noise-- so blessedly different from the cold silence of her parents’ house-- as he stares at her under the yellow glow of the bathroom light.

“You were gettin’ a little misty-eyed on us,” he replies softly, smiling down at her, and it’s only then that Robin realizes that she’s kind of crying. Shit. When did that happen?

She swipes the washcloth in her hand hurriedly under her eyes, smiling her I’m-okay smile back at Steve. 

“Sorry,” she says quietly as Nancy and Max emerge, eerily spotless, from the bathroom. 

“Don’t apologize,” Steve reminds her. 

“Damn, Wheeler,” Jonathan says. “You two look like you were hiding with Will in my truck the whole time.”

“Yeah, what the fuck?” Steve asks incredulously as Nancy grins. “There’s, like, nothing. . . anywhere,” he adds lamely. Robin loves him so much. 

“I have my ways,” Nancy says enigmatically, laughing as she and Max saunter past the rest of the group into the kitchen, probably to ask Joyce what she’s making for dinner. 

“That woman is a mystery,” Steve breathes, and Jonathan snickers. 

“All women are mysteries to you,” he replies, and Steve looks mildly offended before he doubles over in laughter. 

“Shit, Byers,” he says. “I keep forgetting you have a sense of humor.”

More kids spill from the bathroom, and El smiles up at them when she passes them.

“I won,” she informs them again, grinning wickedly and lunging for the kitchen when Steve fakes throwing a punch at her shoulder. 

“Little shit,” he mutters, but Robin can see the smile tugging at his lips as he straightens up, wiping the last of the paint from his left arm.

And yeah, Robin’s home. 

\---

“Ice cream for DINNER?!” Dustin screeches when he sees the spread Joyce has laid out on the kitchen table. She had to purchase a longer table after the kids and Robin, Steve, Nancy, and Hopper started visiting for movie nights, regularly, and it’s practically overflowing with plates of apple pie and bowls of homemade vanilla ice cream, and Jesus Christ, Robin wants to hug Joyce Byers then and there. Hopper does it for her, tugging the short woman against his side as he smiles down at his daughter and the rest of the kids as they crowd excitedly around the table, falling into their seats with matching grins on their faces. 

“Well, Jonathan and Nancy explained before they left about all the hard work you guys were doing today,” Joyce says as she pulls out her chair, “so I just decided, well, screw it. Ice cream and apple pie for dinner. You guys deserve it after the day you’ve had.”

“Thanks, Mom,” Will says from the other end of the table, smiling at her with this quiet fondness that’s just so-- well, Will-- that Robin feels herself tearing up again. Damn, what is with her today?

“No problem, honey,” she says as Hopper plops into his seat beside her. 

“So tell me,” Hopper cuts in, “how exactly did all-- what is it, ten of you? How the hell did all ten of you get covered in paint within the span of one afternoon?” he asks, smiling as the kids use their secret little language again, sending panicked glances at each other across the table. 

“Well,” Nancy says, saving them, “it was kind of. . . a gradual process.”

“Yeah,” Jonathan nods. “I think it started with Lucas.”

Lucas, who’s currently shovelling vanilla ice cream into his mouth, grins wickedly and nods, like, ‘yeah, it was all me, guys’. Little shit. 

“But El stole the show,” Mike says proudly, “you should’ve seen her. Flinging paint fuckin’ EVERYHWERE--”

“Language,” Hopper and Steve say at the same time. They look at each other for a second, like they weren’t expecting each other to say anything, and Joyce muffles her laughter into her napkin. 

El just nods at Mike’s words. “Yes,” she says, all matter-of-fact. “I won.”

“Of course you did,” Hopper says, his voice taking on that Proud Dad quality that Robin only ever hears when he’s talking about El. “You’re. . .” he pauses, as if contemplating his next word, “bitchin’.”

El beams at him, and Max grins at her across the table. 

“She was on my team,” the redhead informs Hopper. “So technically we both won. Plus, I poured an entire can of paint over Will’s head--”

“What?” Joyce says, her mouth quirking up in a smile when she sees Will dissolve into giggles. 

“It sucked in the moment, but now it’s just. . . super funny,” he says, and Mike scowls at Max, clearly still not over the debacle. 

“Sorry again,” she says, more so to Mike than Will, and Steve smiles at the kids as he digs into his pie. Robin can see the exhaustion of the day catching up to him, but to his credit, he still looks happier than she’s seen him in weeks. Finals week took a toll on him-- the dingus is majoring in child psychology at the community college, and Robin is hella proud of him-- and she thinks maybe this is the start of a much-needed break for him. She slings an arm across his shoulders, and he smiles wider, leaning into the touch as El goes into unnecessary detail about the garden she’s been planning with Max and Will. 

“And we’re not planting any tomatoes,” Will is saying as Max shakes her head over his shoulder, smiling evilly. 

“But the tomato is the heart of the garden,” El says seriously, even though the statement makes no fucking sense, and Hopper just points at her like ‘that’s right, kid’. 

When they’ve crammed every last inch of apple pie and ice cream into their mouths, the kids jump up from the table-- how the hell are they not exhausted right now?-- and trail into the living room, already arguing over what movie they’re watching this time. Nancy, because she forgets nothing, shoots Robin a glance as they get up from the table and follow the kids. 

“Yeah, yeah, I brought your stupid movie,” Robin says, and the smile that spreads across Nancy’s face makes the last-minute run to Family Video all worth it. 

“Hey, dipshits!” Steve yells from the kitchen. “It’s Rob’s turn to pick out the movie!”

“Damn it, Robin,” Mike grumbles, flopping back dramatically on the Byers’ sofa. “Pick something that’s actually GOOD this time.”

Robin’s mildly offended, because, hey, Stand By Me was fucking amazing, but she just rolls her eyes at the kid before going out to Steve’s car to grab The Breakfast Club. 

When she saunters back through the front door, all the kids are huddled up on the couch-- Max and El are sharing a blanket, and El’s head is falling onto Max’s shoulder; Lucas and Dustin are fighting over the popcorn Joyce has set on the coffee table, and Mike has one arm around Will and the other clutching the blanket that’s been draped over the two of them. Jonathan and Nancy are sharing the loveseat to the right of the couch, and Joyce and Hopper are cleaning up the last of the dishes in the kitchen as Steve settles on the floor with his back against the Byers’ couch. 

Robin feels it again-- that damn tugging on her heart-- and she waves the movie in the air as Nancy pumps her fist in the air adorably. 

“Oh God,” Mike groans, letting his head fall back miserably on the couch cushions. He’s a dramatic little shit, and Will laughs quietly as Joyce and Hopper shuffle into the room, each holding a glass of wine. They settle on the floor too, even though Hopper grumbles that he’s too old to be sitting on the carpet, he’ll pull something in his back, dammit. 

Robin shoves the film into the video player and rushes to her spot on the floor beside Steve. 

He spreads a vivid, orange knitted blanket over them as the movie starts and Joyce gets up to switch off the overhead light, and Robin recognizes it as the one Max made when Nancy taught her how to knit back in January. They'd spent hours sprawled out on the Byers' living room floor, and it was the longest Robin's ever seen Max sit still. She smiles to herself again, because she’s someone who does that now, and lets her head fall onto Steve’s shoulder. He drops a gentle kiss to her hair as the opening voiceover of The Breakfast Club floats through the room, and Robin’s never been more grateful for her summer job at Scoops Ahoy, because it had sailed her away from her old life and given her this summer and all the endless summers that stretched before them-- years and years and years of finally being home.


End file.
